sturdy Mississippi tears its path through unbroken
forests, and it will do your heart good to see the gallant boat walking
the waters with unbroken and powerful tread; and, like some fabled
monster of the wave, breathing fire, and making the shores resound with
its deep respirations. Then there is something mysterious, even awful,
in the power of steam. See it curling up against a blue sky, some rosy
morning--graceful, floating, intangible, and to all appearance the
softest and gentlest of all spiritual things; and then think that it is
this fairy spirit that keeps all the world alive and hot with motion;
think how excellent a servant it is, doing all sorts of gigantic works,
like the genii of old; and yet, if you let slip the talisman only for a
moment, what terrible advantage it will take of you! and you will
confess that steam has some claims both to the beautiful and the
terrible. For our own part, when we are down among the machinery of a
steamboat in full play, we conduct ourself very reverently, for we
consider it as a very serious neighborhood; and every time the steam
whizzes with such red-hot determination from the escape valve, we start
as if some of the spirits were after us. But in a canal boat there is no
power, no mystery, no danger; one cannot blow up, one cannot be drowned,
unless by some special effort: one sees clearly all there is in the
case--a horse, a rope, and a muddy strip of water--and that is all.

Did you ever try it, reader? If not, take an imaginary trip with us,
just for experiment. "There's the boat!" exclaims a passenger in the
omnibus, as we are rolling down from the Pittsburg Mansion House to the
canal. "Where?" exclaim a dozen of voices, and forthwith a dozen heads
go out of the window. "Why, down there, under that bridge; don't you see
those lights?" "What! that little thing?" exclaims an inexperienced
traveller; "dear me! we can't half of us get into it!" "We! indeed,"
says some old hand in the business; "I think you'll find it will hold us
and a dozen more loads like us." "Impossible!" say some. "You'll see,"
say the initiated; and, as soon as you get out, you _do_ see, and hear
too, what seems like a general breaking loose from the Tower of Babel,
amid a perfect hail storm of trunks, boxes, valises, carpet bags, and
every describable and indescribable form of what a westerner calls
"plunder."

"That's my trunk!" barks out a big, round man. "That's my bandbox!"
screams a heart-st